BlogDrome

Register of copyrights: a national embarrassment

Cory Doctorow: Ernest sez, "The Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, who previously has testified before Congress that the Betamax decision should be overturned testified today before the Senate IP subcommitee that: 1) Int'l copyright infringement was funding terrorism, although she had only rumors and sketchy evidence; 2) Some 'like-minded' countries seek to undermine existing int'l copyright and couch their arguments in terms of 'cultural diversity' and 'encouraging development'; 3) claming that unnamed American commentators on copyright law provide rationalizations for commercial copyright infringement by criminal organizations; and, 4) that we need the INDUCE Act domestically otherwise other nations won't take our arguments about copyright enforcement seriously." Link (Thanks Ernest!)

Pepsi faces a Blogstorm

Public Domain Enhancement Act

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the Public Domain Enhancement Act in the 109th Congress as H.R. 2048. The bill is intended to allow abandoned copyrighted works to enter the public domain after 50 years.

The bill would let copyright owners pay a $1 maintenance fee to maintain copyright protection of a work beyond 50 years of the date of publication. It would add section 306 to the Copyright Act:

(a) Fee- The Register of Copyrights shall charge a fee of $1 for maintaining in force the copyright in any published United States work. The fee shall be due 50 years after the date of first publication or on December 31, 2006, whichever occurs later, and every 10 years thereafter until the end of the copyright term. Unless payment of the applicable maintenance fee is received in the Copyright Office on or before the date the fee is due or within a grace period of 6 months thereafter, the copyright shall expire as of the end of that grace period.

This bill was first introduced in the 108th Congress, as H.R. 2601 in 2003 and "didn't go anywhere."

Via INDUCE Act Blog

Looking for Organs Online

According to BusinessWeek in "Meet Your Organ Match Online," about 88,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for living organs and expecting a transplant. But more than 60,000 patients will die before a liver or a kidney becomes available.

Enter MatchingDonors.com, a non-profit corporation run by volunteers who take no salaries. If you're a potential donor, you tell them that you're ready to give an organ (not sell, it's illegal!). If you're a patient, you register for $295 per month -- 100% of the money paid for patient memberships is applied to running the site.

Then you have access to the full list of potential donors -- more than 2,000 today -- and you look for what you need. Read more for other details and references.

RFID Bracelets to Track Inmates in L.A. County

According to RFID Journal, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is about to launch a pilot program to track 1,800 inmates using RFID devices. If the test is successful, the technology will be deployed for the 18,000 inmates of the L.A. county jails.

With this system, inmates carry a wrist bracelet which issues a signal every two seconds and is caught by RFID readers installed everywhere in the prison. Officers and staff also carry a RFID device attached to their belts. And a central server keeps track in real time of the position of all prisoners and guardians. Besides tracking locations, the system also intends to reduce violence within the jail and to avoid escapes.

If this system works as its promoters think, the potential market to equip all federal, state and county jails in the U.S. exceeds $1 billion. This overview contains other details and references, including a picture of a wristwatch transmitter worn by inmates.

SkypeSee - The Next Skype Feature

Skype Journal reports on the progress of SkypeSee, which is the video conferencing feature that is on Skype's product roadmap (as mentioned here in Toronto during VON Canada last month).  Basically, the latest 17w version beta (IMHO, the product is already in beta, not alpha quality) is pretty light (only 359k) with good video refresh rates and crisp resolution (users can read 11pt. text from the other site - that is impressive).  The GUI still needs some refinements, but the hacker in me finds it OK.  Funny enough, thus far, they are calling this product wigiwigi, and it already has its own forum.

BP, Morgan Stanley have "zero tolerance" for bad coverage

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

BP, following on the heels of Morgan Stanley, has adopted a policy of pulling advertising from publications that give the company bad press, and requiring publications to give BP prepub look-sees if it is mentioned in cover stories, AdWeek reports.

This strikes me as unbelievably stupid and abusive, since magazines are in a very weak position to reject major ad buys from these guys. It's funny that there is so much talk about journalistic ethics, and about how Newsweek must hate America, when corporations are free to abuse the power of the buck.

AdWeek quotes an unnamed publishing exec: "I think it's OK to have systems in place to pull advertisers out, but clearly we don't show them stories ahead of time. ... It's a stupid request. It makes you think these guys are hiding something."

Syndicate Conference (May 17-18, 2005): Themed RSS: Risk, Reward and Revolution, a strategic event not to be missed by publishers, marketers, advertising and PR executives. www.syndicateconference.com Continued reading TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)

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Who's Hot Today? Seattle!

My home town launches a free Wi-Fi pilot in today's who's hot round-up.

Seattle, Wash.: The city turned on free Wi-Fi access in the business districts of Columbia City and the University District, both areas that could use a bit of a boost. In the next month, four city parks will get free Wi-Fi, too: Occidental, Freeway, Westlake, and Victor Steinbrueck.

Police go big with victim picture

"A 60ft high picture of a murdered prostitute has been projected onto a derelict block of flats in Glasgow."

SkypeWatch: How Big will the Skype Empire Become?

In today’s comments at the VON ‘05 conference in Stockholm, Niklas Zennstrom gave some interesting clues as to his ambitions for Skype. I’ve long suspected Skype of wanting to essentially take over and replace the public telephone network, but now it’s coming from the horse’s mouth (from the Inquirer):

Zennstrom revealed that he was particularly keen on an embedded Linux version of his product. The goal appears to bring out devices which contain a dedicated Sykpe client. He almost certainly appears to be thinking of Wi-Fi handsets.

Embedded Skype means  third-party devices can gain interoperability with (and possibly dependence upon) the Skype peer-to-peer network. Like the Skype API, only not restricted to Windows PCs. Imagine that. Licensed embedded endpoints accessing a proprietary network. Kind of sounds like the Microsoft of the early 1990s, doesn’t it?

But that’s not even the most revealing tidbit. Niklas also said that an open standard should be developed to solve the E911 call-routing problem, since, at least at this point, it doesn’t look like Skype is going to be able to avoid regulation (they’re a PSTN-connected carrier, after all).  Skype, of course, does not use an open standard such as SIP or Dundi for its own call-signaling, so it’s somewhat ironic that Mr. Zennstrom is calling upon the community to solve his E911 dilemma with open standards.

For the record, I agree with Zennstrom on that point—an open standard for emergency dispatch calling should be created. But not merely for Skype’s sake.  Of course, if Skype were to embrace an open 911 standard, but not play nice with all the other truly open interop standards out there, it would be a shame.   Since Skype clearly has its focus set on rebuilding the international telecom system as we know it,  I sure hope Skype doesn’t become the “Windows of telephony”.

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Municipality wants to ban famous hacker gathering

The mayor of Boxtel, the municipality where the Dutch outdoor hacker conferences What The Hack resides, seems to be refusing a permit for the conference, citing "grave fear that the organisation of this event will endanger law and order as well as public safety".

Previous instances of this event have seen no incidents of any kind. We feel this matter needs public attention to get resolved, and we issued a press statement today.

Via The Lunatic Fringe. Press Release.

Cox to Offer 15Mbps Speeds

But so far only in Northern Virginia. Cox has confirmed something our resident rumor-mongers predicted last week: Cox will soon start offering a new 15Mbps/2Mbps tier to "Premier" customers in Northern Virginia for $55 (bundled price), as well as boosting their standard downstream "prefe..

Using PGP Implies Criminal Intent?

Minnesota ruling seems to hint so. A rather troublesome ruling in a Minnesota court would indicate that simply having encryption tools on your PC could indicate criminal intent, reports CNET. While the man was guilty of criminal conduct, the use of encryption itself is obviously perf..

How to set up multiple homepages in Firefox

If there's more than one site you always visit after starting up Firefox, you can set your homepage to open several tabs of different web sites at once automatically.

From Firefox's Tools menu, Options, General, enter the addresses of sites separated by a pipe |, as shown above. Or, you can open up all the sites in tabs and hit the "Use Current Pages" button. Thanks, Robert!

Online brokerage price war continues: Fidelity cuts options prices

From Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Patick's note to clients:

Fidelity Cuts Rates for Online Options Trades

Quick Comment: Fidelity Investments announced today reduced base commissions and per contract fees for options trades. Effective immediately, Fidelity has lowered the per contract fee for all online options trades to $0.75 from $1.50-2.25 previously, depending upon customer tier. In addition, the company has aligned its base commission rates for online options trades with its rates for equity trades. As such, the base commission for an option trade executed by a Bronze customer (i.e., no minimum trading or asset requirements) declined to $19.95 from $25, while that for the mid-tier Silver customer (i.e., $50,000+ in assets, $25,000+ in assets and 36+ trades in a rolling 12-month period, or 72+ trades in a 12-month period) fell to $10.95 from $20. Meanwhile, for active traders and those with $1 million or more in assets, the base commission for option trades remained unchanged at $8. Though the cuts in base commission for online option trades were quite significant in some instances, the decision to bring base rates in line with the company's equity base rates is consistent with the industry standard. Meanwhile, the new flat per contract fee of $0.75 is in line with Ameritrade's fee, but now undercuts per contract fees at Schwab and those for all but the most active customers at E*Trade.

Options remain a key area of competition among online brokers. Fidelity's substantial cuts in option trading rates highlight the drive among online brokers to gain share in lucrative options trades. To put the opportunity in perspective, an average retail options trade of 15 contracts or so executed by an active trader at Fidelity would generate commission revenue of $19.25, nearly 2.5 times the $8 commission the company would collect for an equity trade. Meanwhile, we do not believe that the expense differential for an options trade versus a cash equity trade is substantial for online brokers. While we believe that Fidelity's cuts could drive some pricing tweaks among the competition in the coming months, the company's pricing changes, in our view, were much more about bringing pricing in line with the industry than about setting new price points (which mitigates any risk of significant moves from other brokers in response to Fidelity's announcement).

With a meaningful convergence in industry pricing at rather low levels, we continue to expect pricing to stabilize (though we do still expect long-term pricing erosion in the industry). Though we think that aligning pricing schedules within the general range of broader industry pricing is a competitive imperative, we nonetheless think that the focal points of competition are increasingly shifting toward factors such as functionality, speed, execution quality, value-added tools, and customer service, rather than price. Indeed, we simply do not believe that demand is generally elastic enough at this point to move substantial numbers of customers for $1 or $2 per trade. Importantly, in the environment of eroding pricing (rather than falling pricing) that we see, we believe that online brokerage companies can continue to improve profitability through technological efficiencies and scale.

Overweight-V rated International Securities Exchange ($25.44) should be a key beneficiary of any acceleration in retail options trading related to recent pricing cuts. While the push among retail brokers to drive higher options trading volumes among their customers should benefit options exchanges more generally, we believe that ISE's all-electronic platform and deeper liquidity pools makes ISE a natural destination for this liquidity.

The Yahoo Music Business Model

A few days have passed since I used and published my initial impressions of Yahoo Unlimited, and during that time, I have come a conclusion, though that word has such finality to it. Yahoo Unlimited is an ad-supported personal radio network.

There, I said it. Now let me explain. Radio networks normally have preset play lists, and deejays that manage those play lists. The songs, which are broadcast in a one-size fit all model, are interspersed with advertisements. Ads bring in the dollars, and keep large terrestrial radio network owners in gravy.

In case of Yahoo Unlimited, the online company offers up a million songs, turns you into a deejay and charges you $5 a month. (As long as you don’t download the tunes to devices!) If people transfer music subscriptions to a device, they cost Yahoo about $6 a month, and as a result the whole model is unprofitable to begin with. (Business Week reported that Yahoo could be paying around $8 a month to the music industry, but my sources are saying its $6 per subscriber per month.)

Given the state of the MP3 player device market, and the minimal support for devices as of now, in reality Yahoo’s music service is all about making customers sign-up and listed to music on their PCs. It makes most economic sense of the company.

Of that $5-a-month subscription fees, Yahoo is going to send about $3.50 goes to the music industry, a number of industry sources have told me. (Business week put this figure at $6 a month.) As long as folks don’t start moving songs over to their devices! Lets assume it costs Yahoo spends about $1 per user on infrastructure, hosting and bandwidth costs. Its total costs are about $4.50 or so.

In other words, the money to be made for Yahoo here is about $0.50 per user per month or about $6 a year. Even with a million subscribers, that works out to about $6 million a year. That’s not enough to even cause a blip on Yahoo’s bottom-line.

Enter advertising. If Yahoo can sell ads worth $2 a month on its PC-only service, the monthly profits can swiftly climb. More ad-dollars will mean even more cash in the bank for Yahoo! In other words, you play the deejay; create your play lists and ad dollars make it all happen. Just like a radio network, except one with extreme personalization.

Hypothetical scenario: what if Yahoo turned this into a free service, and decided to eat all the costs, that is $4.50 a month – within days it would have more than 20 million users who will sign-up. $6.50 a month of advertising minus the costs of $4.50 every month, on every user means $130 million a month or $1.56 billion a year. Even with costs hovering around $1.08 billion, Yahoo could make some serious cash here. Has the record industry hoisted by its own petard?

The problem is that this model won’t work for Napster or Real Networks – they just don’t have the scale of Yahoo, or the audiences to cherry pick from 176 million registered users. Yahoo will become their single biggest nightmare. And while that is happening, Apple will continue to sell its iTunes! Think of it this way – if Yahoo Unlimited is Infinity Broadcasting, then Apple is Virgin.

There are a couple of issues, I admit.

1. It’s going be tough to sell advertising in an area that right now at least is subscription only and actually convincing consumers would be most difficult aspect of my theory.
2. Given the level of greed at the record labels, they are most likely to demand a cut of any money Yahoo makes on advertising.

But despite that Yahoo has got to be thinking that advertising is their endgame, for sure, or Steve wins his bet. Though I would say, Jerry has better odds. On Yahoo Music every time you look at a bio or something else you end up on a page with a (surprise!) banner ad.

Morgan Stanley's Roach on a China slowdown

Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach believes the world should prepare for the increasing possibility of a meaningful slowdown of the Chinese economy. Here are the key points from Roach's May 23rd piece entitled "What if China Slows?":

Economic Growth

• Supply-side numbers remain strong.
• Re-acceleration of industrial output growth to 16.0% year-over-year (y-o-y) in April 2005.
• Chinese GDP growth trajectory held at 9.5% in Q1 2005.
• Momentum continues to be driven by surging Chinese exports.
• Industrial output for exports estimated to have risen 29.9% y-o-y in April.
• Chinese exports grew 32% y-o-y in April.
  
• Fixed investment grew 26% this year through April.
• While fixed investment growth is lower than the 40% comparisons of a year ago, they exceed the government’s official 16% growth target for the sector.
• Fixed investment sector on track to exceed 50% of Chinese GDP this year.

Demand Side Shows Discomforting Signs

• Evidence of a sharp slowdown in Chinese import growth.
• From Jan-April 2005 y-o-y import growth was 13.5% versus 36% in all of 2004.
  
• This has implications for the rest of the region, which provides China with capital equipment and intermediate inputs for its export businesses.

Chinese Import Growth Fuels Pan-Asian Exports

• 20% of total exports from Korea, Taiwan, and Japan go to China (Singapore - 10%).
• Slowdown in Chinese import growth is already affecting Asia.
  
• In Taiwan, export growth slipped to just 1.2% y-o-y in Q1 2005.
• Japan's exports showed a -0.8% q-o-q, annualized export decline in Q1 2005.
• Hong Kong (+3.5% y-o-y in March), Korea (+7.4% in Q1 2005), and Singapore (+6.2% in March for non-oil domestic exports). 
• In all of the countries mentioned above, the latest export comparisons represent a sharp deceleration from gains six months ago, when the Chinese import boom was cresting.

China's Import Slowdown Affecting Commodity Inflation

• This reflects China’s dominant role in driving world demand for industrial materials. 
• Morgan estimates that China accounted for 8% of global consumption of crude oil, 20% of aluminum, and 30-35% of steel, iron, and coal. 
• Deceleration of Chinese imports has been accompanied by a sharp deceleration of non-oil commodity inflation.
• The Journal of Commerce composite index of industrial materials is now down 3% y-o-y through May 20. Peak increases of close to 35% in early 2004. 
• Commodity prices are one of the best real-time gauges of the interplay between global supply and demand.
• Emergence of negative comparisons for industrial commodity prices could well be a good leading indicator of further weakness to come in Chinese industrial activity.

Efforts to Curb the Property Bubble

• China's recent restraints on both supply and demand could finally lead to a bursting of coastal China’s property bubble.
• This could also lead to a meaningful slowing of growth in fixed asset investment. 
• Fixed asset investment accounted for 44% of total Chinese GDP in 2004.
• Fixed asset investment was still growing at a 26.5% y-o-y rate in April 2005. 
• Like exports, fixed asset investment is also accounting for about 11 percentage points of annualized Chinese GDP growth. 
• Every ten percentage points of slowing in residential property investment could knock about one percentage point off total Chinese GDP growth.

Chinese GDP Growth Risks

• Externally-imposed constraints on exports.
• Internally-imposed restraints on property investment. 

Roach Believes China's Policymakers will be Cautious

• Could mean a delay on currency reform. 
• China’s new export taxes on textile products suggests that it may prefer tax policy over revaluation in order to restrain exports. 
• Despite China’s intentions to manage its export problems, the US, which accounts for about 33% of total Chinese exports, seems prepared to make changes themselves.

Key Deficiencies of China’s Growth Model

• Excess reliance on exports and fixed investment.
• With little private consumption, the Chinese economy is vulnerable to shortfalls in either of these sectors.
• Private consumption accounts for only 42% of China's GDP.

Conclusion

• Conceivable there could be a meaningful slowing of the Chinese economy.
• It is likely to be driven by China’s internal measures as well as by anti-China actions.
• If that occurs, China’s Asian supply chain should be especially hard hit.
• A China slowdown could also result in further downward pressures on commodity prices of oil and non-oil industrial materials. 
• Could also temper inflationary expectations embedded in global bond markets. 
• If there is a delay in revaluation, pressure on the US dollar could be tempered.

Why Now

• New and more difficult challenges today than before. 
• Property bubble is an increasingly worrisome source of internal instability. 
• The currency-export nexus has become an increasingly intractable source of external instability. 
• China faces growing pressures to make change. 

According to Roach:

....This time, it will be much tougher for China to avoid a meaningful slowdown.  It’s time for the rest of the world to prepare for just such a possibility.

Comment: Full article here.

Ourmedia Surpasses 5,000th Upload Milestone

Ourmedia.org, which "provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.", has surpassed its 5,000th upload in a little over two months of operation (Ourmedia.org Surpasses 5,000 Uploads). Congrats!...

CNN.com switching to free video

In part of a growing trend, MediaDailyNews reports that CNN will soon offer free video on its website, abandoning their subscription service in place since March 2002 that cost users $4.95 a month. In addition, CNN.com will be producing specialized two-minute newscasts every hour called "Now in the News." The new service will launch June 20th and be ad-supported, although CNN does plan to launch a separate subscription service in the fall that will give users access to multiple live video streams and CNN's video archives, but a price for that hasn't been set yet.

New York Times to charge for some content

The New York Times announced yesterday that they'll soon be charging for access to some content on its website, in particular its Op-Ed and news columnists. The subscription service will start in September and cost readers $49.95 a year. Not suprisingly, reaction from bloggers has been swift. Meg Hourihan pretty much sums up the general sentiment with the headline to her post on the subject: The NY Times wants less links.

Download of the Day: MSN Search Toolbar

The just-released MSN Search Toolbar adds desktop search to Windows, email search to Outlook and web search to Internet Explorer.

The MSN Search Toolbar adds a search box to four places: your Windows task bar, your Outlook toolbar (not including Outlook Express), Internet Explorer and Windows File Explorer. The initial index takes awhile to build on large hard drives with lots of files, but the search is fast and the results complete, for a much better alternative to Windows' built-in search. The bummer, of course, is the Outlook/IE-exclusive support for web and email search. (Note: both the free Copernic and Google Desktop search support Thunderbird and Eudora email.) So, final verdict? The MSN Search Toolbar is perfect for IE and Outlook users, and ok for others looking for a quick built-in desktop search. Free download, Windows only.

Google Maps Chicago Crime

Just-unveiled ChicagoCrime.org is a free database of criminal activity reported in Chicago which uses Google Maps to display where bad things happen.

For example, here's a map of reported armed robberies with a handgun, here are wrongdoings reported between 2 and 3 AM on May 5th, and this is a list of misdeeds that occurred in a bowling alley. It's the Chicago police blotter on crack! (Pun intended). Chicagoans, RSS feeds for your neighborhood crimes available so your newsreader can scare you out of your wits. The data ranges from Februrary of this year until May 5th, and presumably will be updated. Thanks, Jason!

FCC to make e911 mandatory

LightReading’s unnamed sources say that The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is going to make basic e911 mandatory requirement for all VoIP providers, and the decision could come as soon as May 19th. e911 is a politically charged issue, and many in FCC and Congress are worried about a consumer backlash, which might affect future election results. The VoIP service providers will have till early November to comply. In other words, nothing much they can do about it. “This could quickly put a monkey wrench into some of these startups’ plans,” Jon Arnold of Arnold & Associates told LR. This is going to force VoIP providers to spend some serious dollars, and could possibly be the first step in the much awaited shakeout in the market. The bells, in many ways could one again emerge winners. I think this does prove out the age old telecom theory: those with infrastructure are going to win. Or something to that effect.

Clay Shirky's : Ontology is Overrated - Categories, Links, and Tags

Clay Shirky comes out with a very comprehensive paper on web content ontology and he goes to the extent of analyzing the likes of Periodic table classification, yahoo information architecture, del.icio.us mechanisms to come to the conclusion that ontology is overrated. Extracts with edits and comments from a near 25 page heavy stuff article.
On Tagging :Many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the digital world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. What we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. Our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging – free form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown , one can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
On Browse Vs Search :Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user's needs and the user's view of the world. If you want something that hasn't been categorized in the way you think about it, you're out of luck. The search paradigm says the reverse. It says nobody gets to tell you in advance what it is you need. Search says that, at the moment that you are looking for it, we will do our best to service it based on this link structure, because we believe we can build a world where we don't need the hierarchy to coexist with the link structure.
On Categorisation :A lot of the conversation that's going on now about categorization starts at a second step - "Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should..." But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of not categorizing. Even Google adopted DMOZ, the open source version of the Yahoo directory, and later they downgraded its presence on the site, because almost no one was using it. When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.
On Tags: As you can see here, the characteristics of a del.icio.us entry are a link, an optional extended description, and a set of tags, which are words or phrases users attach to a link. Each user who adds a link to the system can give it a set of tags - some do, some don't. Attached to each link on the home page are the tags, the username of the person who added it, the number of other people who have added that same link, and the time. Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.
On Tags & Conclusion:The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine. It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break - by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

Category : Tags

Google AdSense for Feeds

Google is now offering Google AdSense ads for RSS feeds of blogs and such. You can apply to participate in the public beta. This is what the help page states, verifying recent rumors: "We're currently beta testing AdSense for feeds, a program that ...

OpenRAW

So there's this pattern of maturity in a technology -- from proprietary to "open" -- as players in the industry resolve they can't bet their future on trusting one particular player. And so it is happening in the digital camera industry, as users and developers demand an OpenRAW standard.

How Battlestar Galactica Killed TV

Don Melanson writes "Following up on the MPAA going after torrent sites, you may be interested in Mindjack's latest feature - Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV by Mark Pesce. It includes a post-script written in reponse to the recent Torrent site shutdowns." From the article: "While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the first series. Piracy made it possible for 'word-of-mouth' to spread about Battlestar Galactica."

Download of the Day: Audacity

The free sound editor software Audacity lets you record and edit digital audio, convert tapes and records into MP3's or CDs, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together or change the speed or pitch of a recording.

If you've got some old mix tapes laying around you'd like to digitize, or you're up for jumping on the podcasting wagon, Audacity's the way to go. Free as in speech, Windows/Mac/Linux.

Does Skype have Infrastructure?

Some sleuthing shows that it does…

One of the most amazing aspects of Skype has been this unshakeable belief that the company does not have any network infrastructure, barring a few directory servers and other more web-related boxes. In the early days Vonage offered same arguments – we don’t have network infrastructure – thus we are more efficient. More subscribers signed on, network outages began, and well there is infrastructure. And increasingly it costs money.

How can Skype be any different? After all despite its P2P nature, there needs to be some management. The edge can be smart, but hyper-smart? And given that it’s growing like weeds after a monsoon shower, I wondered how could Skype sustain the quality that endears Skype to its users.

I admit, after contemplating about this road, I put this on the back burner. I have been lately distracted by other stuff I am keen on these days, and have largely ignored the nuanced stuff lately. I am trying to rectify that. Fortunately for all of us, there are three men who did not believe - Aswath Rao, DG Lewis, and James Enck.

Lewis thinks that now that Skype had SkypeIn and SkypeOut, it needs to connect with PSTN, and that means hardware that would interface with partners like Colt, iBasis, and Cable & Wireless. He argued that since Skype uses a proprietary technology, it would at some point need to convert signals to more commonly used protocols.

Somewhere, SkypeOut traffic has to be converted from G.729a packets to G.711 A-law or mu-law TDM (and the reverse for SkypeIn). And somewhere, call control signaling has to be converted to some standard PSTN signaling for network interconnection.

Aswath then theorized:

My theory is that they treat the media gateways as Skype clients and so they “register” with a supernode, which are Skype’s own computers. These supernodes map Skype protocol to SIP. Here SIP is only a “trunking” protocol. So the mapping is not complex.

James, did more work, and chatted with his sources within the company and came up with this argument:

“It is my understanding from recent conversations with the company itself that Skype has built and deployed its own-spec gateways, and that supernode designation is far from a random selection process. Also, the now-famous “authentication server in Denmark” is not the only one of its kind.”

In final conclusion, there are signs that Skype has infrastructure, though details on it are hazy. Aswath puts it best when he writes,

For a long time Vonage and its apologists were claiming that they do not have any network infrastructure and are still able to offer voice service. It has stopped as the network failures became well known. Slowly it is becoming Skype’s turn.

Every Search Engine Is Different!!

We recently covered Phil Windley's collection of search engines which Phil says he uses on a regular basis when looking for different types of information.In a study of Internet searches, only 3% of results were shared by Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo, demonstrating the differences between the major engines.Dogpile research shows that the search results delivered by Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo differ substantially from one another. Using a random sampling taken from query logs, the study found that just over 3% of the returned results were shared by Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo. Some 12% of the returned results were listed by two of the three search engines. And 85% of the results were unique to one of the three search engines.
Major search engines are not interchangeable and that metasearch engines offer a broader range of top-ranked results.As a metasearch engine, Dogpile aggregates search results from Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo.Beyond simply gathering search results from several sources in one place, Dogpile tries to make the results more relevant by combining sponsored and algorithmic results in a single ranked list. The text label "Sponsored by" distinguishes one kind of result from another. This is a significant departure from Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo, all of which separate paid links from unpaid ones more clearly using color, graphics, and position on the page. Dogpile also adjusts the order in which search results appear using its own search technology. While Dogpile's self-sponsored survey-in which a metasearch engine finds there's value in metasearch engines-makes a strong case for using the site, consumer usage patterns have a logic all their own

Category :Search Engines

Bit Torrent + RSS & The Deathknell For Prime Ad Slots!!

Guy Brightonpoints to Ntro' amazing insight about the evolution of Web TV. By combining RSS with BitTorrent we'll have sort of mini-Tivos on our PC - able to select the content we want at a micro level. With Bittorrent and RSS, one can easily create an internet-based periodical broadcast of huge files with almost zero distribution cost. With MythTV and Torrentocracy, one can create a set-top box such as a Tivo or VCR that consumes such a broadcast. It’s possible to replace (or complement)a satellite receiver and DVD player with a cheap PC running MythTV, and still stay up to date on Desperate Housewives.
Most popular TV programs are available via BitTorrent within hours (sometimes minutes) of their debut. That’s not revolutionary– Tivo has provided that ability (sans BitTorrent) for years. What makes this device truly revolutionary is this: Not only will this be able to download scheduled network programs, it will be able to download multimedia content from any feed to which you decide to subscribe. BitTorrent, unlike most file transfer mechanisms, performs best when there is high demand for a resource, because the load is distributed across all clients, including the ones that have not completed the download. Through RSS, a feed provider can announce a new resource to all subscribers as soon as it available, thereby immediately creating high demand for the file, and fast downloads for all. BitTorrent’s biggest weakness is the inability to view partial content, thus making it suboptimal for on-demand videos, since you can’t start watching the video until you’ve finished downloading it. That’s what makes RSS and BitTorrent such a happy couple– if configured properly, files can be downloaded as they are announced (say, in the middle of the night or while you are at work), and will be complete by the time you are ready to watch them, eliminating the need to stream content.

The effect Guy brighton says would be the final deathnell for the 30 second spot. The ads, they won't even be there - the TV & Ad industry will have to work together to find new ways to support each other.
Category :Emerging Trends, Emerging Technolgies

Dogpile Learns New Tricks

Dogpile has released a significant upgrade to its meta search engine, allowing easy comparison of search results across the major search engines. Dogpile has also introduced a new comparison tool that visually illustrates search engine overlap (or lack thereof) in...

Where the Audience Is

Online, of course. From Mediapost's coverage of a Burst study:

Asked about their media consumption habits over the past year, 61 percent of the respondents said they spend more time on the Internet today than a year ago, with 32 percent saying they spend "much more time," and 29 percent claiming to spend "somewhat more time" online.

Also, Fathom reports keyword prices are up 11% in April.

Mother Jones on Tri-Cities Muni Battle in Full

Read the full Mother Jones article on municipal broadband (enter code MJZL6Y to read full article): The fine folks at Mother Jones sent me an access code and permission to post it so you can read the full article they published in this month's issue about the Tri-Cities, Illinois, battle with SBC and Comcast on one side and the city's business-backed goals of providing municipal broadband on the other.

Interestingly, the Tri-Cities now have substantially greater broadband services: the two incumbents spent hundreds of thousands to defeat two ballot initiatives, and then probably tens of millions to upgrade their networks.

Details Come Out Concerning Lawsuits Over Verizon's Aggressive Email Filtering

Late last year, Verizon customers discovered that the company had implemented an extremely aggressive anti-spam filter that was blocking (without notice!) almost all foreign emails. A lot of small business people claimed they lost business from this. Verizon's oh-so-friendly response was that those people should learn to use a phone instead. Of course, this is the same company that mocks people for expecting their mobile phones to work at home, so it's cavalier attitude towards customer complaints doesn't seem out of character. In January, there was talk of a class action suit against the company, and it appears that's moving forward. Currently, a lawyer is trying to negotiate a settlement, but says he's willing to take it to court. Verizon continues to stand by the filter, with vague statements about how important it is to stop spam. The article also notes that at least one person has sued Verizon in small claims court, saying that he's lost business because of Verizon's policy. Verizon told him he can apply to be put on a whitelist, but his email request to have that happen bounced, because Verizon claimed it was spam. There's nothing wrong with trying to fight spam, but it seems clear that Verizon's filter is way too aggressive, and without any realistic way for customers to make sure they're not losing emails, it seems that Verizon's "suck it up and deal with it" attitude isn't going to do them any favors.

Firefox 1.0.4 Official

Hits Mozilla front-page. While users have been tinkering with the unofficial build for a few days, Mozilla today officially released Firefox 1.0.4, which tackles the arbitrary code execution vulnerability that recently made headlines. Users in our Mozilla forum share their ..

Broadband through Gas, Seriously

For starters, guys I would like to say, that I am not making this up. A San Diego-start-up, Nethercomm Corp., which has no trial partners or no known venture capital backers, is promising that it can deliver up to 10 gigabits per second broadband using natural gas pipelines.

The idea here is to encode the broadband signals using ultra wideband and beam them through the pipeline, and then at the gas meter, the signal is offloaded (using Nethercomm equipment off course) to on-the-premise wireline or wireless networks. The company, which lists Patrick and Ann Munally as co-founders, thinks this is a neat work around the current restrictions on the UWB for now. Since the wireless transmitters are in the pipeline, it is a closed environment. The company explains that its technology needs no modifications to the existing natural gas distribution infrastructures.

Still, I find the whole concept a little baffling. The biggest concern is UWB itself. I understand this as a short-range technology, which can deliver great speeds. Here is what wikipedia has to say about UWB.

Ultra-wideband or UWB is a developing communication technology that delivers very high-speed network data exchange rates across relatively short distances with a low power source. Although the connection speed decreases quickly as a function of distance, UWB has the potential to replace the cables that currently connect devices.

If that is the case, then it means that a substantial number of UWB modules would need to embedded in a pipeline, and that could make the project a tad expensive. In other words, it would need some serious dollar commitment from gas companies. For instance installing the hardware inside the pipes would entail shutting off gas supplies. That alone could be a cost prohibitive affair. In addition, the energy companies are still recovering from their ill-conceived affair with fiber and broadband networks, led by the king-con of them all, Enron. Ann Nunally, President and COO of the San Diego-based Nethercomm Corporation in a press statement was quick to say, that they “have been extremely tight-lipped about this innovation until our Patent Portfolio foundation was completely in place.”

Having said that, energy and gas companies use wireless sensors for meter readings and monitoring the health of the pipelines.

More from Techdirt and Corante

Wired News statement on contributor Michelle Delio

Xeni Jardin: A number of blogs and publications are discussing a controversy surrounding the veracity of sources cited by freelance writer Michelle Delio. Her work has appeared in online venues including MIT's Technology Review (which ran this retraction two weeks ago) and Wired News -- which has just issued a statement on the matter.

MIT Technology Review Online on March 21 retracted two stories written in whole or in part by Michelle Delio, citing the publication's inability to confirm a source. On April 4, InfoWorld edited four articles by Delio to remove anonymous quotes. Wired News has published more than 700 news stories written by Delio (under the names Michelle Delio and Michelle Finley) since 2000. In April, we assigned journalism professor and Wired News columnist Adam Penenberg to review recent articles written by Delio for Wired News.

Penenberg and his staff of graduate students at New York University reviewed 160 articles, largely from 2004, but some earlier stories were also checked. Penenberg provided Wired News with a list of 24 stories that contained sources he could not confirm (links are included at the end of this story). Penenberg's report to Wired News can be downloaded here (PDF). Delio, in communications with Penenberg and Wired News, stands by her reporting and the existence and accuracy of her sources. Most of Delio's sources were in fact located and confirmed by Penenberg.

The unconfirmed sources affect the content of these stories to varying degrees. For example, the Florida network tax story contains only one quote from a source Penenberg could not confirm, but the quote does not materially affect the rest of the story. However, there are four articles in which unconfirmed sources arguably play a more prominent role.

ws Releases Source Review" (Disclosure: I am a contributor to Wired News).