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Bob Young was the founder of RedHat, one of the original examples of putting open source software to work in a business model that made sense.
Practical adaptation ?
In May, Mr. Bragg removed his songs from the MySpace.com Web site, complaining that the terms and conditions that MySpace set forth gave the social networking site far too much control over music that people uploaded to it. In media interviews and on his MySpace blog, he said that the MySpace terms of service made it seem as though any content posted on the site, including music, automatically became the site’s property.
[Snip ...]
About a month later, without referencing Mr. Bragg’s concerns, MySpace.com clarified its terms of service, which now explain who retains what rights. A sample line: “The license you grant to MySpace.com is nonexclusive (meaning you are free to license your content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com).”Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group for musicians that focuses on intellectual property rights, said the Internet could help musicians warn one another about potential contractual problems. “Information is now shared in a different way,” she said, “and artists who are getting a bad deal can connect with each other.”
Mr. Bragg, who said he never had any direct communication with executives from MySpace, has put some of his music back on the site. And he offered some praise for the site’s effectiveness in spreading his message. “That’s the amazing thing about MySpace,” he said. “If you say something, word gets out.”
Tags: MySpace, Billy Bragg, intellectual property, online music sharing
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The concluding paragraphs excerpted below from Josh Marshall’s April 2003 article "Practice To Deceive" in which he sets out very clearly the real possibility that all the current disruption in the Middle East is exactly what the neo-cons - Wolfowitz, Perle, Gaffney, Abrams, Feith, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, et al - have intended or wanted to bring about all along.
Via Juan Cole.
IMO the Israelis and the USA are just salivating, waiting for the slightest reaction from Syria or Iran to open the path for declaring WW III.
At least 37 children were killed !
Found in the comments on the Firedoglake blog:
I just got this statement from Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb on net neutrality:
The internet represents democracy in action and must be protected. More than perhaps any other medium, the internet provides an open and free marketplace of ideas and speech, as our founding fathers intended in the first amendment to our Constitution. The internet has been open and free since its inception, and it should remain open and free moving forward.
Just as importantly, the blogosphere provides strong checks and balances on the corporate media and on governmental power. This is particularly crucial at at time of serious overreach by the executive branch, as we now are experiencing.
Finally, there is a fundamental fairness issue at stake here. Given that the internet is increasingly indispensible to educational and career advancement in today’s economy, it is essential that we keep it accessible and affordable to all Americans - not just to the wealthiest corporations and citizens.
Allowing big telecom companies to provide preferential service to large content providers over the “little guy” is both wrong and undemocratic. For all these reasons, I strongly support net neutrality.
Webb is facing George Allen, the Senator on the Commerce Committee who obeyed his telecom lobbyist pals and voted against net neutrality.
I’d vote for this guy if he were in my voting district … period. Would you ?
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If Tony Blair’s sickeningly sycophantic licking of Dubya’s arse the other day at the Washington press conference, accompanied by maddeningly blatant propaganda about how much these two war criminals ‘care’ about people and lament the death and destruction going on … if this most recent performance does not hasten his disappearance from British and international politics, nothing will.
At least his colleagues are beginning to realize and openly state what an arsehole he is.
Don’t let the Cabinet door hit you in the arse, etc. etc, … Tony
Via the Observer
Cabinet in open revolt over Blair’s Israel policy
Tony Blair was facing a full-scale cabinet rebellion last night over the Middle East crisis after his former Foreign Secretary warned that Israel’s actions risked destabilising all of Lebanon.
Jack Straw, now Leader of the Commons, said in a statement released after meeting Muslim residents of his Blackburn constituency that while he grieved for the innocent Israelis killed, he also mourned the ‘10 times as many innocent Lebanese men, women and children killed by Israeli fire’.
He said he agreed with the Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells that it was ‘very difficult to understand the kind of military tactics used by Israel’, adding: ‘These are not surgical strikes but have instead caused death and misery amongst innocent civilians.’ Straw said he was worried that ‘a continuation of such tactics by Israel could destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation’.
The Observer can also reveal that at a cabinet meeting before Blair left for last Friday’s Washington summit with President George Bush, minister after minister pressed him to break with the Americans and publicly criticise Israel over the scale of death and destruction.
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Via the UK’s Independent.
Bush and Blair, press conference …
Hizbullah started it (supposed political party, according to Bush), these people don’t want freedom and democracy, it scares them, etc.
No mention of many years of Israel terrorizing the Palestinians .. they’re ALWAYS just defending themselves (aggressively, if need be)
Syria and Iran supplying Hizbullah, Hamas, terrorists with arms, etc.
No mention of the long-established and huge supply of bombs, rockets, tanks, figether planes to israel by the USA.
Repeated ad nauseum .. freedom and democracy, freedom and democracy, those "ideologues" must be defeated, and we will not waver.
… in the NY Times (behind a paywall)
Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history.
For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.
It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states.
Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?
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I remember when Autonomy (one of the first artificial-intelligence driven search engines) came out, promising the ability to analyze and assess patterns in text, and thus direct or help people to better search and connect with what they were seeking.
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Long blog post warning …
Below is the introduction to a report titled "The Time Is Now - Digital Capabilities, Digital Culture, Networked Markets" that I researched and co-wrote for a group of Canadian government policy makers.
This introduction was intended to provide context and orientation to the growing evidence of interconnected interactivity happening in the area euphemistically known as *new media*.
Many Different Factors …
Let’s go back in time … approximately 20 years, to a seminal event in the stimulus and/or acceleration of cultural transformation … the invention and rapid mass popularity of the Sony Walkman. I believe a forceful change was introduced by combining the microchip, miniaturization, effective industrial design and the relative ease of recording music onto a digital format such as CDs.
All of a sudden people began to be able to choose their own music, and walk around or engage in activities with a soundtrack of their own choosing playing in their head. They were able to create a personal aural experience as the background to the life they’re watching pass in front of their eyes. Figuratively, people were able to be a main character in their own movie.
As the parallel IT/PC revolution began and grew, the personal music recorder also evolved relatively rapidly … from cassette tapes to mini-Discs and CD’s, to added features that made navigation and copying CD’s easier, and most recently, MP3 files, music downloading, music piracy, and almost complete freedom to become one’s own DJ, composer and audience. The phenomenal popularity of the iPod is not hard to understand.
So too with the advent and evolution of image-making equipment … first video recorders, then digital cameras and cell-phones with digital picture-taking capability that have enabled easy uploading of pictures to the Internet, and most recently inexpensive high quality digital video recorders. Services that support the playful, enjoyable and social-network based use of these capabilities have been proliferating at lightning speed, evolving in parallel with the rapidly spreading social phenomenon of blogging. A leading example is Flickr, a wildly popular photo-sharing and relationship-creating web site.
Another useful example that speaks to the effects of digital capability is the change in viewing habits and use of television is the time-shifting versatility of TiVo technology, which uses the power of the microchip to change the nature of viewing digital video and sound content. Now PVR’s (personal vide recorders) based on this technology are being purchased and installed by significant numbers of television viewers. In effect they can now record onto hard disk whatever they want to watch, whenever they want to – no more bulky VHS tapes
More and more software and equipment is becoming available every month that helps people shift from being only consumers of broadcast content to active participants in collaboration if not producers of their own content. It is becoming clear that the impact on peoples’ lives due to the interactivity-enabling character of the digital infrastructure will be very large, and is still in an early stage of evolution.
A Sense-Surround Creative Culture
“Maybe one day, this technology will be able to create an experience of all the senses … but until then, we should try and experience our own sense of the world around us.”
- Sensorama (The New Youth Culture of Intense Experience), St. Lukes, UK4
This statement from the Sensorama report by St. Lukes introduced an interactive web presentation developed in 1999-2000 by the groundbreaking advertising agency and trends consultancy St. Lukes, of Covent Garden, London UK. Much has happened since, at both extremes of the ubiquitous and constant polarities that define our post-modern age.
The impacts of the silicon chip and our full-blown entry into the digital age have been forecast for quite some time … and have to date been experienced in stuttering, start-stop-forward-hold-on-step-back-start-again bits and bytes, so to speak. A plethora of books (examples such as the Toffler’s PowerShift, Negroponte’s Being Digital and Robert Barnard’s Chips and Pop – Decoding Generation Nexus) have warned us, time and again, that in a wide range of ways the future will be more and more different - that we will not go back to the stable and in retrospect slow-moving environment that existed pre-computer, pre-Internet and pre-World Wide Web,
What Happened?
We’ve had a long slow buildup to the interconnected Digital Age – an age where work, play and general life are increasingly surrounded by interconnected integrated applications and embedded silicon chips. The early days of the Internet were 30+ years ago now, the PC as a common tool made it debut only 20 years ago, and the Web only a little more than 10 years ago. Along the way, information hardware and software have continued an inexorable path towards greater …
· integration of functionality
· interoperability of elements or components
· ease-of-use and general usability
· affordability
· ubiquity of access and use
It has also long been understood that information technology (and more recently interconnectivity) hold out two great promises for human activity – promises that are both purposeful and playful, and which enable both work and hobbies, passionate interests, and creative collaboration and entertainment.
The first promise was a major increase in efficiency … doing things more simply, more easily, and faster while offering greater combinations of choice, access and availability - mass customization.5 - at the same or reduced cost.
The second promise has been the long-predicted wave of socio-cultural impacts. The conditions in which (we) increasingly live arguably represent the first time on human history that humans have had their minds, needs and creative imaginations lined together in ways that allow them to collaborate, consume and construct in various combinations of “together”.
What happened .. ? Well, I think that with hindsight it was pretty predictable. Dot.com boom, dot.com bust, much suspicion, decision makers who still aren’t particularly tech-savvy or interactivity-adept, major resistance to change, an environment everywhere focused mainly on money .. and so on.
But … it’s not over yet. The growth of interconnected interactivity continued to develop and grow, and today we have a world increasingly full of blogs, wikis, BitTorrent, YouTube, MySpace. Do you think it’s over yet ?
The tendency is to overestimate the impacts of change in the short-term, due to the details and structural dynamics of the systems in place … and to underestimate the impacts of major change in the long-term, due to the accumulated compound and interrelated effects.
- widely used, multiple attributions
Demographics … then Sociology and Culture
One of the widely-acknowledged key drivers of fundamental change is demographics . Much has been made during the past two decades of the study and practical use of demographics, for policy-making by governments and to support economic investment and development theories and practices.
So too, the coming of the first-ever digital generations – digital natives, or Homo Zappiens (W. Veen)7 has been the subject of exhaustive study and speculation. The rapidly approaching demographic shifts are increasingly becoming a basis for economic models and market positioning of services.
(R. Barsalo, SAT)
It’s clear that the digital generations use and experience different forms of input and activity and live and work differently than 50 year-olds do today, and that outside the big things like love, health, freedom and general physical security, often view life’s challenges and rewards differently.8
I believe it’s clear that many of the developments of the past three or four years occurring at the intersection of technology and patterns of consumer and producer behaviour are beginning to integrate and converge. Changes that have been viewed as “on the horizon” are beginning to come together thick and fast, and are taking shape in important ways.
We’re all watching and waiting.
4 Sensorama – The New Youth Culture of Intense Experience, St. Lukes, London, UK, 2001
5 The principle of mass customization has been developed by academics Pine and Gilmore and Stan Davis, amongst others
6 Attribution: Dr. G. Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Business, McGill University
7 Homo-Zappiens – Research by Dr. W. Veen, Technological University of Delft, The Netherlands
8 SAT Presentation, Digital Natives slide
Tags: Digital natives, marc prensky, Web 2.0, culture, creativity, interaction, change, resistance, policy-making
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Should the cable television companies and large networks be worried ? Skype, after all, did cause some consternation to the telephone-focused telecommunication industry, no ?
Om Malik reports that eBay has funded the initiative described below, and that the leaders of the initiative are really "engaged".
Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are at it again. After disrupting the music and voice cartel’s operations, the duo is taking on television.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise. I had reported on that as part of the Business 2.0’s June 2006 cover story, The 50 Who Matter Now. In the little profile on the boys, we mentioned, “Their next move is rumored to be a company that will enable peer-to-peer television. If experience is any guide, broadcast and cable TV execs should be afraid. Very afraid.”
The whole Om Malik piece is here.
Tags: Skype, IPtv, digital television, eBay, accelerating change
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Here’s what I look like as I whip the butt of my buddy Ean (Little Mako) Jackson
Can you hear the
One click on DropPad … open Qumana
Type in title of blog post
Type body of message …
Open "Source View".
Paste html snippet where the cursor is flashing …
Posts that contain Qumana per day for the last 30 days.
Get your own chart!
Return to WYSIWYG … check and adjust line spacing if desired …
Add italics … check Categories for this post.
Insert Q-Ads text advertising if desired … place cursor where you want the ad, click on "Insert Ad", type a keyword (use the customizable banner designer to customize ad), then click OK.
Check which blog you’re posting to …
Add Technorati Tags by clicking on "Insert Tags"
Type tags into dialog box, click OK.
Take a last look …
Click on "Publish Post".
Presto !
Tags: Qumana, offline blog editor, easy blogging, ease of use, usability
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Frank Paynter of Listics is being an effective steward of a virtual memorial space.
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I know this is disrespectful of authority and all that, but I couldn’t help myself …
1.
Several posts down I mentioned the Sunlight Foundation’s Pop-Up Politicians html snippet thingy which enables a reader to reach into a database containing information about their background, voting records and such .. something that I think is useful for creating and maintaining a consistent degree of transparency about what they do and how they do it.
When will that marker be reached ?
Tonight Technorati states it is tracking 49.4 million blogs, so I assume it will be towards the end of this coming week that the 50 million mark will be passed.
I see trees of green
Burn in the west
Storms in the south
While the icecaps are a mess
And I think to myself
Someone please save the world
… sung to the tune of "What A Wonderful World"
Great pic, great song … go check it out.
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… develop through conversing, as Earl Mardle points out here.
For me, the relationships I choose to put effort into building online have a central component to them.
I put effort into them as I learn that I can trust these people to argue with me, or me with them … or explore silly ideas, or be somewhat inarticulate .. and they will still listen.
Via ThinkProgress, in a blog post citing John Bolton opining on the "Kiss of Death":
The White House released a fact sheet yesterday entitled, “Setting the Record Straight: President Bush’s Foreign Policy Is Succeeding.”
The sheet declares not once but four times that the administration “is rallying the world behind its policy,” and claims that “a consensus is building behind the President’s foreign policy approach.”
I thought they were brazen a couple of years ago … now I think they are insane.
Psychosis … "derangement of personality and loss of contact with reality and causing deterioration of normal social functioning".
Slow head shake, no bemused chuckle.
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"The YouTube videos coming out of Lebanon were pretty horrific. They not only showed the civilian deaths, all the kids blown to bits, etc., but they showed that these are just regular people like you and me trying to live their lives and raise their kids. Putting a human face on the ‘enemy’ is intolerable.
YouTube must scare the shit out of the warmongers.
I’m serious. One guy with a videocam can broadcast to the world in minutes. Never before was that possible."
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Found in comments at the Hullabaloo blog
I noted with interest that the Bush Administration is RUSHING bombs and aviation fuel to Israel…this is the same Administration that took days to respond to the terrible humanitarian crisis after Hurricane Katrina.
I guess they’re more interested in taking care of their Israeli friends than in the American taxpayer.
To which I’d add
No doubt, imo.
Via the NY Times, in an interview with Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision (2nd largest producer of video games).
And personally, I believe in the near-to-medium-term future we will see a much greater use of the idiom of video gaming in workplace applications … for better and worse.
Marc Prensky has a lot to say about how technology may evolve to continued impact on learning and *work*.
Q. What have you learned by watching your daughters play games?
A. The video game business is primarily a male-oriented business. And I have three girls. And you see the things that are important to them in their game experiences are the social interaction.
They love the ability to chat with their friends. They love the ability to have some connection online with other people. They love the ability to use voice-over — like the little Skype telephone where they can talk to somebody else.
And one of the things I think you’ll see in this next generation of video game hardware is that there is this shift taking place from games that are really played in a solitary manner to these game experiences that will be much more social in nature.
Tags: Marc Prensky, video games, interaction, learning, work, wirearchy
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Via the NY Times …
My opinion is fully conveyed by the headline of this post. No doubt Microsoft believes it sees clearly the future of DRM, and will be building in what they believe is appropriate for the partnerships they will seek.
I’m probably wrong. What else is new ? 
Microsoft Confirms That It Is Developing a Competitor to the iPod
Published: July 22, 2006
By Bloomberg NewsThe Microsoft Corporation confirmed yesterday that it was developing a portable music player to compete with the iPod from Apple Computer for a share of the $4 billion market for portable entertainment devices.
The first products are to go on sale this year and are being developed under the code name Zune, the general manager, Chris Stephenson, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. Part of the project is a service that will compete with Apple’s iTunes.
Microsoft is abandoning a strategy of relying on partners to produce devices with its Windows software to compete with iPod. They so far have failed to dent Apple’s 77 percent share of the market in the United States for digital music players, according to the market researcher NPD Group Inc. Even with its own product, Microsoft has an uphill climb
Tags: Microsoft, Apple, iPod, Zune
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I just found this amazing example of the use of a widget on the JOHO blog
Via CNN.com
Bush’s German back rub magnified on Web
[Snip ...]
Coupled with Bush’s use of an expletive at the summit and a U.S. senator comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," the incident reveals anew the power of the Web — and YouTube, specifically — to beam embarrassing political gaffes around the world.
Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, agrees that today, public figures have to be more careful in "a thousand ways." But he maintains sites like YouTube can be revealing.
"If they’re not doing something that’s embarrassing, they have nothing to worry about," he says. "A president ought to know enough not to use an expletive in a fairly open meeting and almost any male alive today knows that you don’t offer uninvited massages to any female, much less the Chancellor of Germany."
Many writers saw a sexist aspect to Bush’s back rub. "This isn’t a Sigma Chi kegger, it’s the G-8 Summit," wrote blogger Christy Hardin Smith on Firedoglake.com
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It seems clearer and clearer that the Bush administration is ready to label anyone who doesn’t agree with American values as "terrorists", and that it is ready to, or will, wage war against all and sundry who have been so labeled.
Wonder where Osama is these days ?
From the Washington Post (Misleading Headline Alert !):
In Mideast Strife, Bush Sees a Step To Peace
Fred S. Zeidman, a Texas venture capitalist who is active in Jewish affairs and has been close to the president for years, said the current crisis shows the depth of the president’s support for Israel.
"He will not bow to international pressure to pressure Israel," Zeidman said. "I have never seen a man more committed to Israel."
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Maybe it’s all the fault of the liberal media, Democrats and others who disagree or disapprove of Bush administration policy, and anyone who just doesn’t believe enough …
Via Hullabaloo … the full post is here.
Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.
Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.
Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.
"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said — anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq’s unity.
One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation’s future
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BTW, I am also timing myself as I post this.
George Harrison and the Pirate Song
Including the typing of text, less than one minute
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.. gives new meaning to the "You" in YouTube.
As in "You" actually means "Our".
Via Blogaholics, here’s an interpretation of YouTube’s recent announcement. I suspect that many bloggers will take similar action.
YouTube has changed their terms and conditions to include the following:
"…you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels…"
Which basically means that they can do whatever they want with the content you upload to their service and they can make money from it. And because it is a tranferable license, they can give your content to anyone else to do whatever they want with it. And if tomorrow some big media company buys YouTube they will have the same rights to your content. You loose all control over how your submissions are used.
I think a lot of people are missing the point when they say that the terms also say "The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website." or that you have to give YouTube the right to distribute your content anyway if people want to see it on their site. The point here is that now YouTube can make money from, and let anyone else they want make money from, your content, without having to ask you first.
I don’t mind sharing my video and my pictures. I don’t mind other people using and remixing what I create. If you look at my Flickr pictures they are all licensed with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license that permits it. But I do not want other people to make money from it without asking me first.
So I’m deleting everything I have on YouTube.
Other posts on this: here, here, here
Update: Oh, and notice that they don’t exclude your private videos from this.
BTW, a similar move by MySpace led Billy Bragg to remove all his music from MySpace.
I also suspect that means that YouTube is further positioning itself for acquisition by CBS or NBC or CNN .. or something like that.
Tags: youtube, video, rights, license, terms of service, goodbye
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Here’s how I used to do things before I started using Qumana regularly:
I’d be browsing, and I’d be reading something which triggered a thought and then the desire to blog about it.
I’d leave the page, open my blog page, go to "Post New Entry", which would take me to the blog software’s editor (which had taken me a while to learn).
Then, I’d put in a title, and maybe write a sentence or two.
This work stitches together eloquent photography and equally eloquent narrative.
It also demonstrates alternative points of view that we all too rarely get to see and read in North America … points of view that can help us realize the sheer superficiality and inadequacy of so much of the information we are fed.
PS .. I am glad to say I may have played a tiny, tiny role in helping this get up there onto the Web (so glad we have the Web !)
Tags: shahidul Alam, shahidul news, citizen journalism, eloquence
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What YOU can do using Qumana, Stylefeeder and MySpace …
It just looks cool …
‘Bridget Jones’ blogger fire fury
British secretary in Paris becomes Online ’cause celebre’
LONDON, England (CNN) — A British secretary working in Paris who says she was fired because her Paris employer objected to her Weblog has provoked an old and New Media storm.
Unmarried mother Catherine Sanderson — "La Petite Anglaise" to 3,000 regular readers of her Internet diary — is launching legal action in France, claiming unfair dismissal against accountancy firm Dixon Wilson, British media reports say.
The "old fashioned" firm was never named in her blog. Sanderson, 33, also remained anonymous — except for her photograph on her Web site.
Now Sanderson claims to have been "dooced" — the New Media term for getting fired for what you write in a blog after a Web designer lost her job for writing about her job and colleagues on her site, Dooce.com.
Tags: La Petite Anglaise, dooced, Dixon Wilson
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via Doc Searls weblog:
Don Thorson has a new gig with Jajah, which has a new way to do VoIP over what we used to call "long distance":
One of my favourite groups of all time.
… Watts Wacker says …
In his most recent email newsletter (yes, that’s what HE still uses - I have suggested to him in a private email that he consider blogging … no response yet he starts off with these first few paragraphs:
Blogging is becoming a journalism tool, and based upon what’s coming out of the computers of regular Baghdad residents… like dentists and middle managers it is an important tool at that.
Since war reporters are rightfully concerned about going into certain unknown areas, it’s the people who live life daily in these areas who give us their truths. If you follow the blogging "flow" over the last year in Iraq the subject matter has shifted from… no infrastructure… to American military acts of what I guess I’d call recklessness (like amusing yourself by shooting rubber bullets at civilians as sport)… to the radical death squads rampaging through their neighborhoods.
Blogging will take on a very deep role in the future social structure.
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Jack Cafferty, the crusty curmudgeon of tv anchors, just read
Via the BoingBoing blog.
In a misguided attempt to supposedly curtail terrorists communicating on blogs, BoingBoing reports the following:
India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.
Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: "Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?"
An interesting (and I believe correct) perspective from Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration.com on the commoditization of strategy for businesses looking to respond to a turbulent and rapidly-changing environment
I think it is going to have to do with creativity. In a world where strategy is a commodity, creativity becomes the vital factor from which value flows. When everyone can think strategically about everything, the locus of value creation shifts from out-thinking everyone to out-creating them. The prime mover of value creation becomes putting the ability to create (goods, services, processes - even strategies) at the heart and soul of the firm.
Now, we see the hints of the revolution everywhere - from the death of mass culture/blockbusters, to the rise of free culture, to the exploding investment in innovation and design, to the flight of capital away from the US. I think it is going to create enormous challenges for firms - challenges which can’t be answered by thinking strategically; but can only be faced by thinking creatively.
All of which requires a sea change in the ways we manage; the ways we coordinate; in the primordial, deep DNA that every firm shares. It requires a new way of thinking about value - one with roots in creativity, not strategy.
I see this as related to the themes in Dan Pink’s most recent book (A Whole New Mind) and Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class.
And Constellation W.
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Wake up, folks !
It seems obvious to me that when you see on television John McCain and Newt Gingrich being interviewed (if you want to call it that) by Larry King about the difficulties that have erupted between Hizbullah and Israel, and they pronounce in sonorous, almost melodramatic tones "Yes, Larry, I DO think we could legitimately call this the start of World War III … "
… that this is the set-up line for stuffing the next major tranche of propaganda down everyones’ necks.
Think about it for a moment.
Politicians .. but not the President or the other President (Cheney) … saying on a widely watched television show that
- the citizens of the world are indeed facing WW III,
- Israel has every right to be flattening civilian sections of Beirut (after a not-in-power group of guerillas have kidnapped a couple of Israeli soldiers), and
I’m beginning if the word "marketing" should be changed to "ingmarket" ?
I think I feel the valences of all you digital electroids out there getting ready to jump from here to there …
From the recent engagement of Nestle with the blogosphere to Richard Edelman and Co’s elegant demonstration of how not to do it whilst exhorting everyone else to do it (Sir Martin, Tear Down That Wall), to the release of the book The Long Tail … something’s happening and mostly we still don’t know what it is.
The book Gonzo Marketing - Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke is for my money the best book I’ve read about what marketing can and should consider, develop and integrate into the conduct of business (and for that matter other forms of activities by governments and NGO’s etc.)
Via Hugh Macleod’s acknowledgment, reflecting back to us the insights offered by this Blaugh post (excerpt below).
As the virtual world continues to encroach on the solid 3D world, and as our individual and collective sociologies on and off line blur into each other, here’s a nifty little example of how stupid it can and might get.
A patent on the "process" of making and sustaining friendships (well, we can argue about whether it will be perceived to be a patent on the technology or on the "process" … see above point re: lines blurring).
WTF ?
Millions of fans poured into the streets in celebration late last week, when the social networking megasite Friendster.com was awarded a patent on managing real-life relationships. Until now, relationships have been difficult to maintain - with no effective friendship tool firmly in place. With the Friendster patent, suddenly that task has become a lot less daunting.
No longer will the phone break-up suffice; people must now go through Friendster to start and stop any kind of relationship. Friendster executives, knowing what’s best for humankind, have vowed to sue the pants off of any friend who thinks they can manage friends without going through Friendster - this includes every aspect of any friendship, either online or in the living room.
On the same day, Friendster announced joint ventures with leading dictionary publishers to officially change the spelling of the word “friend” to “friendster” just to show how serious they are about running your friendships.
I will be interested to see if this will backfire on Friendster (or how it might), as so much of what HAS worked in this hyperlinked interconnected environment depends upon openness and the lack of walls and other barriers.
Tags: social networks, social networking, friends, friendship, friendster, idiotic demonstration of not understanding dynamics of social newtorking
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Well, think of all the things in life that actually have changed for the better. The food’s got better. Absolutely beyond question, the food’s got better in America. The coffee is better. Bread is better. I’ll bet you could go out from where you’re sitting in Sacramento right now, I’ll bet you could walk 500 yards and probably be able to find a decent loaf of bread. You could, couldn’t you? If I said that to you 20 years ago, you would probably have had to taken an airplane and flown all the way to France.
Now, why did this happen?
It’s because hippies in the ’60s decided they wanted to have whole-grain bread and be healthy, and then they also wanted to have properly roasted coffee. And so, they gradually got organic-food stores that actually were quite good, and the bread got better, and there were farmers’ markets. Now, all this happened in the teeth of political onslaughts by both parties who were, of course, in the pay of the food industry.
In my local town of Eureka, Calif., the other day, I went into Pierson’s, which is the main building supply place where you buy stuff if you’re redoing your house and all the rest of it. I looked at their coffee booth. They were selling coffee from nine beans from nine different countries. Nine! This is not some hippie hangout. This is where mighty men with measuring tapes in their waist belts and huge hammers hanging from their trousers
Just a random snapshot .. via CNN.com.
If only …all the rich guys on the planet would open up and stop trying to control all the cash, oil, etc., and let all inhabitants of the planet work more at building lives for their families, meeting more of each other and enjoying the fabulousness of the miracle that is nature, life, food we grow, the air that we breathe … in other words, recognize the miracle is not theirs but all of ours …
I am convinced that most (maybe not all) of the root causes of terror are attempts to make change to the oppression stemming from the control of resources and the systems of governance constructed to maximize that control.
Invading, killing and subjugating are emphatically NOT the best ways to engender freedom and democracy.
This makes the statements such as "You get the government you deserve", or "the best government money can buy" take on real new meaning.
It will be fascinating to watch how Muslim terrorists
- swim through the Strait of Hormuz,
- around the bottom end of Saudi Arabia,
- up the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean past Gibraltar,
- across the Atlantic Ocean,
and then (using the miniature plastic earth drills they strapped on) rather than carrying out a risky nighttime landing somewhere in Chesapeake Bay, bore all the way through to the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, popping out of the ground after midnight to join their air-borne colleagues who have flown gliders camouflaged with reflective invisibility paint to parachute down into the popcorn field to meet up with them.
Remember, this is 4th -generation warfare .. no big honking battleships or B-52’s to detect .. these guys have to avoid all the incredible arrays of electronic technology that watches our backs, bristling with anticipation of something important happening.
What a bunch of fucking idiots we humans are, collectively.
.. and I can honestly say I know him (something I have to be careful about these days, having recently been anointed E-hole of the blogosphere by Brian Moffatt of BMO fame.)
May I introduce Phil Wolff, editor of the Skype Journal.
As a sometimes (and more often than not wannabe) strategist, I recognized that I immediately fell in love with this comment of Phil’s, repatriated from his past to illustrate on a point on his recent blog post.
Strategy is about gameplay, viewing the world as scenarios to win, then picking your best moves. If I understand you, you’re suggesting not only that everyone is playing chess, but that everyone is reaching grand master status. Of course mastery begins to look like art.
100 years’ ago, the ability to use a phone was rare, and conferred comparative advantage in business. Now that everyone has it, everyone has those same advantages and you must do more than be able to dial and answer the phone.
50 years’ ago, typing was a rare skill. As it’s become comoditized, you’d think those who’d type fastest would be better with computers.
25 years’ ago, the tools of strategic analysis were restricted to military officers and a few MBA professors. Today millions of people consider their goals in the context of what other players will do. SWOT analysis is taught in high schools. Risk analysis is an everyday mindset in the online poker culture. And business is a spectator sport.
I’m not sure strategy is completely fungible; not all experts play from the same handbook, carry them with the same personality and soft skills, or share the same insights that frame strategic thought. Perhaps minor league strategy is a commodity, covering the 20% of strategic tools that yield 80% of the value. Mastery could mean applying the other tools well or being able to make new tools when none of the existing ones fit your situation.
It comes down to what you mean by creativity. Strategy driving innovation? Innovation driving strategy? Or sparking the one in a billion shot that creates entirely new ways of seeing the world and kicking over the table?
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… have, as many people know, launched a civil suit against I. Lewis Libby, Karl Rove and Richard Cheney.
It will be very interesting to watch unfold … the defendants in a civil suit will have to answer questions such as "Did GWB authorize you to leak that information ?" It may also be that the Republicans will come to regret their ferocious support for a similar action by Paula Jones in the Clinton years, allowing a sitting president to be deposed.
Etc., etc., etc.
What I have found particularly interesting in all that I have read thus far about this new initiative is that 1) Amb. Wilson not only tried for months to get the Administration to address the falsity of the yellow-cake allegation, and 2) that some of the former members of Junior’s Dad’s cabinet also tried hard to get that message heard.
I suspect that this particular element of the full scope of information can or will be quite damaging to the deposed individuals. It’s not that hard to imagine them being insistent on going ahead with the Iraq invasion, and having had the intent and strategy to do anything to discredit Wilson’s information, and then when he exposed the lack of evidence in the NY Times seek retribution by exposing his wife.
Read some much more informative reporting on these issues here and here.
1. Privately urged Administration to correct the false allegation in the State of the Union for months. When the Administration refused, Wilson exercised his right to speak out about governmental problems.
2. The case starts with a bang, with the quote from GHWB (Dad, POTUS 41):
…. "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
This is a poke on several levels, and amusing in that standing outside the fray looking in sort of way.
GWB has issues with his father, we have been told over and over by family and friends and insiders in the Bush milieu, and this quote just rubs salt in that wound by pointing daddy’s finger directly at all of Junior’s minions.
Beyond that, I have heard that not only did Joe Wilson try directly and through back channels to let the Administration quietly know that the "16 words" were in error, but that a number of GHWB’s old gang tried to also do so on Amb. Wilson’s behalf, much to the irritation of Junior and the consternation of Dick Cheney.
Tags: Libby, Rove, Cheney, civil suit, Wilson-Plame
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Apple pie for whales, aka Ask A Ninja’s "What Is Podcasting" Special Delivery.
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… is me.
I (and I expect a few other people) have just been through a vivid learning experience … occasioned by me fucking up a simple piece of netiquette re: changing my email address and advising people.